Happiness Rules

What is the point of all those strange moral rules the Church has? Why bother about them? 

Reading: Matthew 5:20-26

The following homily was preached to the student brothers during compline. You can watch here or read below:

At your funeral, What do you want people to say about you?

“He was always so well dressed,” or, “He was such a great guy: he just had so much money”. Perhaps they will say: “He had a great love of fine wines,” or “He was just brilliant at Monopoly.” Now, these are all good things. But they are not what make us good human beings.
Even if they say at our funeral, “he was a great gardener”, or a “gifted painter”, “he was a composer of genius”, these too are good things. But they are not what make us good human beings. If we want to know what would, then we can come back to that initial question: At your funeral, What do you want people to say about you? Perhaps we hope they would say something like “She was very wise, She was fair-minded,” or, “He always loved others and did everything in his power to help those who were in need”.

We are able to say that these are amongst the many things that make human beings good because we all share a common human nature. Because of this nature, we can say there are things that are bad for us, and things that are good for us, because they lead to our flourishing. Just as we need food, drink and sleep if we are to flourish, so too in the moral life – the actions we make – there are things that lead to our flourishing. And we call these virtues.

A virtue is a good habit. It’s good because it helps us act well, choosing the right way to act, the right thing to do in particular situations. Virtue is not something that exists in the abstract; it’s something we practise in particular instances over a lifetime, and this forms our character.

But to cultivate virtue we need two things: guidance and grace. I’m going to focus on the role of guidance. Our culture’s tendency to understand freedom solely as personal autonomy has led us to forget that we are invited to another, deeper sort of freedom. If we take up this invitation, we do not have to chose between being good or happy. But rather, by acting virtuously we can become both good and happy.

Guidance in the moral life has another name, and this is where rules and the moral law come in. Rules, moral law. Don’t those words sound restrictive? Now they can sound restrictive to us, especially when most people – including so many Catholics – have lost faith in the moral credibility of the Church.

Like any laws, the Church’s teachings on the moral life are in some ways restrictive. But they free us up to live well – in short to lead a life that is virtuous. No one would describe a person characterised by unlimited indulgence in an appetite for food, drink, money or sex, as ‘flourishing’. And that’s why all human communities, from the family to the state, have regulated these things in some way.

Think of a pianist. Aren’t you glad that generally speaking pianists play with their fingers rather than their fists? That they generally play in time? That they practise before they perform a difficult piece of Mozart at the Proms?

Well, each of us is just like that pianist. Because we have a human nature that is given to us whether we like it or not, we cannot decide all the rules which govern our behaviour ourselves: we need guidance, we need practise. And we need to learn from our mistakes. This is where moral laws – rules – come from. The Church’s moral teaching – guidance on how we should act – is not arbitrary, but is rooted in who and what we are: human beings, made for relationships, and made for happiness.

And unlike the pianist, who is exceptional and amazes others, in the moral life no one is called to be a mere spectator: everyone is called to greatness, everyone is called to live virtuously. Why?

The answer is simple: so that we can be happy. And so that we can flourish in the deepest and fullest way imaginable. The Church gives us a roadmap for happiness which does not just guide us here and now, but culminates in the life of Heaven, where all happiness is fulfilled and perfected. Jesus himself says it in today’s Gospel: ‘if your virtue goes no deeper than the scribes and Pharisees then you will never enter the kingdom of Heaven’.

Will we embark on this adventure or will we choose to remain at Square One of the map?

And this roadmap (of rules and virtues the Church offers us) doesn’t just regulate our happiness as individuals, it also order rightly the way we relate to each other, and therefore determines the happiness of our families and societies as a whole. And that brings us back to where we started: at your funeral, what do you want people to say about you?

Image: The Land of Cockaigne by Pieter Bruegel the Elder (c. 1525–1569) (Wikimedia Commons)